Domtar Sustainability: Pulling Our Weight

Unlike their counterparts in Pulp and Paper, our logistics colleagues in Personal Care don’t have a weight problem. Quite the opposite, they struggle to put it on.

Optimizing transportation efficiency is the objective for both of our divisions. They both strive to get the most product in a trailer. One is weight constrained. The other has a space issue.

The reason for the difference is that personal care products are lightweight. It is easy to fill a trailer and be well within the regulated weight limit. The challenge for our logistics colleagues in Personal Care is how to max out the allowable weight limit.

In Greenville, North Carolina, where we manufacture a variety of adult incontinence products, our colleagues have been hand-stacking 85-100 cases of product in between the last four pallet loads on a truck whenever possible.

We ‘‘make space’’ this way for all of our intra-company shipments. This is especially beneficial for shipments to our U.S. West Coast distribution centers.

Over the eight years we have been doing this, more and more customers are agreeing to accept trailers loaded in this manner. We and our customers have found that the increased labor to load and unload each trailer is offset by needing to unload one less trailer for every 10 shipments or so.

Similarly, our facility in Aneby, Sweden, has made arrangements with some customers to send them extra-tall pallet loads. By sending pallet loads that are 250 cm tall rather than the typical 200 cm, we are able to more fully utilize the space on trucks, which can be up to 300 cm tall.

The result: more efficient transportation, lower fuel costs and reduced truck emissions.

Our colleagues in Toledo, Spain, create space by reducing package size for an equivalent product count. Their award-winning, high-compression packaging system for incontinence products reduces packaging volume by 30 percent.

The result: lower consumption of plastics and corrugated packaging, fewer pallets, reduced number of truck trips for the same volume of delivered product, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. At Domtar, we are working smart to max our weight!                                                       

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Domtar’s 2017 Sustainability Report details the company’s endeavor to take a longer term view of creating and preserving value for our shareholders, customers, employees and communities.  For more inspiring stories about Domtar's sustainability efforts, visit the Domtar Newsroom. To view the full 2017 Sustainability Report click here.